Short Fiction · Desire No More (2/2)

“How’s things between you and the opposite sex?”

“About normal.”

“No wife⁠—no steady girl.”

“Not a very good idea, in my racket.”

MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed between Isherwood’s eyes. “You can’t go!”

Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his temple veins. “What!” he roared.

MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst was over, and his face was apologetic, “Sorry,” he said. He seemed genuinely abashed. “Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go, all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and drives.”

Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him⁠—anger, and more fear than he wanted to admit. “I’m due at a briefing,” he said tautly. “You through with me?”

MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. “Sorry.”

Ish ignored the man’s obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. “Big gun in the psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo’s slipping, Doc. They did put some learning in my head at college, you know. Therapy, hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn’t do anything to help me!”

“I don’t know,” MacKenzie said softly. “I wish I did.”

Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.

Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd⁠—that fool psychiatrist hadn’t seemed to take up that much of his time.

He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of “Marty!” ringing in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster, as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.

Ish looked up bitterly at the Receptionist. “No,” he said.

“But everybody fills out an application,” she protested.

“No. I’ve got a job,” he said as he had been saying for the last half hour.

The Receptionist sighed. “If you’ll only read the literature I’ve given you, you’ll understand that all your previous commitments have been cancelled.”

“Look, Honey, I’ve seen company poop sheets before. Now, let’s cut this nonsense. I’ve got to get back.”

“But nobody goes back.”

“Goddam it, I don’t know what kind of place this is, but⁠—” He stopped at the Receptionist’s wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were in and out and hold baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room⁠—a big room, he realized⁠—seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too.⁠ ⁠…

“Let’s see your back!” he rapped out, his voice high.

She sighed in exasperation. “If you’d read the literature⁠ ⁠…” She swiveled her chair slowly.

“No wings,” he said.

“Of course not!” she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. “No horns, either.”

“Streamlined, huh?” he said bitterly.

“It’s a little different for everybody,” she said with unexpected gentleness. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.

“Who do I see?”

She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. “See?”

“About getting out of here! Come on, come on,” he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. “I haven’t got much time.”

She smiled sweetly. “Oh, but you do.”

“Can it! Who’s your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!” His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.

Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. “I’ll call the Personnel Manager.”

“Thanks,” he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.

The Personnel Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.

“Martin Isherwood!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’m very glad to meet you!”

“I’ll bet,” Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager’s hand a short shake. “I’ve got other ideas. I want out.”

“That’s all he’s been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,” the Receptionist said from behind her desk.

The Personnel Manager frowned. “Um. Yes. Well, that’s not unprecedented.”

“But hardly usual,” he added.

Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he⁠—shucks?⁠—the Receptionist wasn’t such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. “Sorry I lost my head,” he said.

She smiled back. “It happens.”

He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.

“Now. Let’s get this thing straightened out. I’ve got⁠—” He stopped to look at his watch. “Six hours and a few minutes. They’re fueling the beast right now.”

“Do you know how much red tape you’d have to cut?”

Ish shook his head. “I don’t want to sound nasty, but that’s your problem.”

The Personnel Manager hesitated. “Look⁠—you feel you’ve got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that’s the way you’d put it. But, let’s face it⁠—that’s not really what’s galling you. It’s not really the job, is it? It’s just that you think you’ve been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.”

Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. “Don’t put words in my mouth!” he snapped. “Just get me back, and we’ll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.” Suddenly, he found himself pleading. “All I need is a week,” he said. “It’ll be a rough week⁠—no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won’t be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to⁠—as long as it doesn’t look like the trip’s responsible, of course.”

The Personnel Manager hesitated. “Suppose⁠—” he began, but Ish interrupted him.

“Look, they need it, down there. They’ve got to have a target, someplace to go. We’re built for it. People have to have⁠—but what am I telling you for. If you don’t know, who does?”

The Personnel Manager smiled. “I was about to say something.”

Ish stopped, abashed. “Sorry.”

He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. “You’ve got to understand that what you’ve been saying isn’t a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn’t it?”

“Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.”

“How long’s it going to take?” Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.

“Not long,” the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.

“Earth,” the Personnel Manager said.

Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.

He looked around him. The Moon was silent⁠—quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.

Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.

“It’s not the same,” he said.

The Personnel Manager sighed.

“Don’t you see,” Ish said, “it can’t be the same. I didn’t push the beast up here. There wasn’t any feel to it. There wasn’t any sound of rockets.”

The Personnel Manager sighed again. “There wouldn’t be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here⁠—vacuum.”

Ish shook his head. “There’d still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear⁠—and, maybe, maybe there would be. There’d be people, back on Earth, who’d hear it.”

“All right,” the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a little.

“Ish! Hey, Ish, wake up, will you!” There was a hand on his shoulder. “Will you get a load of this guy!” the voice said to someone else. “An hour to go, and he’s sleeping like the dead.”

Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.

“Come on, Ish,” the Crew Chief said.

“All right,” he mumbled. “Okay. I’m up.” He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.

Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.

The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.

He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn’t left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.

He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.

“It was easy,” he said over a worldwide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.

MacKenzie was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.

“Ish.”

It was MacKenzie, bending over him.

Ish grunted.

“It wasn’t any good was it? You’d done it all before; you’d been there.”

He was past emotions. “Yeah?”

“We couldn’t take the chance.” MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. “You were the best there was⁠—but you’d done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot⁠—nothing else. You’ve never read an adult book that wasn’t a text; you’ve never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don’t know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn’t take the chance, Ish!”

“So?”

“There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.”

He remembered the time with the Navion, and nodded. “I might have.”

“I hypnotized you,” MacKenzie said. “You were never dead. I don’t know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you’d been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.”

“I said it was easy,” Ish said.

“There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?”

“Yeah. Now get out before I kill you.”

He didn’t live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again⁠—he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.